1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to user health assessment. The present invention more specifically relates to determining the effects of risk factors on user health.
2. Description of the Related Art
Keeping track of various aspects of personal health is an important part of living a long and productive life. To that end, various services are available to assist people in tracking different aspects of their health. For example, numerous web services provide general health information to a user. These informational services provide articles, discussion forums, and other educational information. These web services allow users to search, retrieve, and review content of particular interest or applicability. For example, one existing web service provides specific information for diabetes while another service provides information related to controlling blood pressure.
Other web services provide calorie information for foods that a user might eat. Such services allow users to list those foods consumed by the user and calculate a corresponding breakdown of the calories. This type of service is inconvenient, however, in that it requires a user to track all foods that are eaten throughout the course of a day much less a single meal. Most users, too, do not take the initiative to provide their meal information to the meal tracking service to access calorie information. These meal tracking services typically return the number of calories consumed and little additional information. The usefulness of such services is thereby reduced.
Some web services allow a user to submit a question to a practitioner with experience related to the subject matter of the question. The web service will then “post” or otherwise publish the answer to the user's question after some period of time. These web services do not consider any personal information about the user when addressing their question and may provide only broad-based and generalized information that is unlikely to be individually tailored to the requesting user. Further, the answer is posted by the web service and is not kept confidential between the user and the practitioner.
There is a need in the art for a health service that provides health information specific to the needs and health risks of a particular user. Such a service should offer ease of use not only for the end user but also for the entity providing the health information tailored for the particular user.